To Flash or not to Flash?

My website is ancient and badly in need of a makeover. The main purpose of my website is to show reels. I have been browsing a lot of reels in the demo reel section and I notice that it seems as if some people have figured out a way to use Flash and flash movies on their reels and the reels load and begin playing almost immediately and it looks pretty good as well. Faster than QuickTimes and the designs seem to support weird fonts and look consistent across browsers and platforms.

I know very little about modern web design. Could someone post their opinions of the pluses and minuses of an all Flash site?

Most of the people who I want to see my reel are fairly technical, producers, ad agencies, corporate clients who are pretty tech saavy so I don't need to worry too much about appealing to Ma and Pa Kettle's ancient PC with an eight year old browser.

For those of you who have or have created all Flash sites, please list what you like about it and for those of you who stuck with HTML, can you list why you didn't go with a Flash site?

An all flash site would work well for what you are going for. Only difficulty is the learning curve of learning the Adobe Flash application. It's not as easy to get started building a website in Flash as it is to build a website with HTML. The learning curve, however is not too great with all the online tutorials there are available.

Flash is also very open ended so you really need to know what you are going for at the onset of your project and how to accomplish it using Flash. Otherwise you could get lost pretty quickly trying to piece together your flash website.

Thanks for the advice, I appreciate it. I will be hiring someone who knows Flash to do this website, I don't really have time to learn it. I am not by any means of the imagination a designer either.

Once the site is uploaded, is it very difficult to change out the Flash movie for an updated one or is it all tied together like a .PSD file? That might be the only challenge to Flash, I would need to change out the movies and possibly some copy at least twice a year. Once the site is built, is that something a non-Flash experienced user could do with step by step instruction or would I have to go back to the designer each time?

One way to set it up would be to have a CMS (content management system) where you could login and change any elements of the website that you would wish. This could then dynamically change fields or elements in the flash site. This would mean your designer would have to have more than just knowledge of flash though but should be possible for most skilled web technicians.

Another way to set it up would be to have specific files that you could update via FTP which the Flash site is reading when it loads.

The .FLA file is equivalent to the .PSD but Flash is much more dynamic in its ability to grab content so you should be just limited to editing the .FLA file to change the content of the site. Though I suggest you do have the web developer send you a copy of the .FLA file when they get done in case a future web developer needs it.

If you are not concerned about search engines, Flash is good. But Flash content is not visible in Google, Yahoo, etc.

This mean that if somebody goes to Google and type some keywords like "video production" and your city, you will never be seen there.

You can have the HTML site with some flash content, like your reel. But if you are going to do all of your site in Flash, you should have at least some considerations, like adding meta data and an HTML version of your contact info just in case.

Talk to your web developer and see what options does he recommend to you.